Hills Place

Hills Place is a narrow turning at the north-western corner of Soho, set just off Oxford Street near Oxford Circus. It is one of the slim lanes and courts that thread the blocks behind the main shopping street, easy to pass without noticing from the busy frontage outside.

The street was formerly called Queen Street and is thought to have taken its present name from a local resident, T. H. Hills, in the 1860s. Like much of this edge of Soho, it grew up as a service and trade address behind the grander commercial fronts, a pattern that has continued into its present mix of offices and small businesses.

In recent years Hills Place has drawn attention for a piece of contemporary architecture: a building by the practice AL_A whose aluminium facade is cut with angled glazed openings, designed to bring daylight into the confined width of the lane. The intervention made use of exactly the qualities that long kept the street obscure, its narrowness and its position away from the main road. Hills Place sits close to Regent Street and the western boundary of Soho, a quiet contrast to the traffic of Oxford Circus a short distance away.